Existing User

The [senior White House] aide said that guys like
me [i.e. reporters and commentators] were 'in what we call
the reality-based community', which he defined as people who
'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of
discernible reality'. I nodded and murmured something about
Enlightenment principals and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not
the way the world works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire
now and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again,
creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's
how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all
of you, will be left to just study what we do.

In 1979, Rosalind Krauss recognised a crisis in the institution
of critique. Aimed at the anachronistic medium-based distinctions
still prevalent at the time, her text 'Sculpture in the Expanded
Field' provided a cogent warning to would-be historicists. Krauss
accurately surmised that, in the adaptation of conventional
categories in order to account for contemporary art's ruptures with
certain object-based traditions, the critic was in danger of losing
the validity of the very terms he or she sought to protect. As she
argued, in the discussion of post-War American art, 'categories
like sculpture and painting have been kneaded and stretched and
twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity, a display
of the way a cultural term can be extended to include just about
anything'.2 Using the state of contemporary
sculpture to force the issue, the text's implications are realised
indirectly in the institutionalised linguistic parameters

Footnotes

Ronald Suskind, 'Without a Doubt', New York Times Magazine, 17
October 2004.↑

Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's
Passage from Painting to the Readymade (trans. Dana Polan and Th.
de Duve), Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press,
1991, p.115.↑

'Pictures' is the title of an exhibition curated by Douglas
Crimp that opened at Artists Space, New York in September 1977,
including works by Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine,
Robert Longo and Philip Smith. An essay of the same title was
published by Crimp in October, vol.8, Spring 1979, pp.75-88.
Editor's note.↑

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, The Neo-Avant-Garde and the Culture
Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975,
New York and Cambridge: October Books, 2001, p.xxi. It should be
noted that a similar implication of 'critical failure' (Owens's
term) is at play in the work of these critics, i.e. that in their
deconstruction of the institutionalised rhetoric of validation they
rely on the authority granted to them through processes of
accreditation, peer review, etc., in order to present their
critique of those very procedures by which legitimacy is
naturalised.↑

This calls to mind a scene in the film version of Tommy (Ken
Russell, 1975), where the protagonist's mother, lounging in her
all-white luxuriously tacky retro-futurist bedroom, throws a bottle
of champagne at the television - itself a mass-produced cube - that
in response spews forth a procession of fluids, first champagne,
then baked beans, and, later, in a progression that is more and
more abject, what is presumably chocolate, each of which she
ecstatically writhes about in.↑

'Rhoade Work' is a reference to a piece by Jason Rhoades titled
Rhoades Construction, produced on the campus of UCLA in Los Angeles
in 1993, where he was a graduate student. See Eva
Meyer-Hermann(ed.), Volume: A Rhoades Referenz, Nuremberg,
Eindhoven and Cologne: Kunsthalle Nürnburg, Stedelijk Van
Abbemuseum and Oktagon, 1998, p.135. 'Peace of Shit' is based on
Jason Rhoades's comments on his installation Perfect World at the
Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 1999. 'There's a whole lineage to it.
It's about this "oneness" of shit / It really has to be at one with
itself. It does not have any real connections. It is a piece of
shit but it had peace... I was going to call the whole thing "A
Piece of Shit". It would have been nice to talk about this big
piece of shit.' Eva Meyer-Hermann and Jason Rhoades, 'A Place Where
Nobody Could Step Over My Electrical Cords, Or: The Next Level. At
the End of the Rainbow. Perfect World', in Felix Zdenek (ed.),
Jason Rhoades: Perfect World, Cologne: Oktagon, 2001, p.36.↑

According to most accounts, the conflict between Büchel and Mass
MoCA begun as a budget disput about Büchel's planned exhibition at
the museum, and continued with the museum's modification of
Büchel's work without his approval and consequently with Büchel
abandoning the project. In response, the museum asked Büchel to
reimburse them for his expenditures; Büchel refused, and also
rejected the museum's request to show the work in its unfinished
state. A Massachusetts court judge ruled in favour of Mass MoCA,
allowing the partially finished work to be exhibited. For more
information on the events, see Henry Lydiate, 'Moral Rights:
Christoph Büchel vs. Mass MoCA', Art Monthly, November 2007, p.45.
See also 'Christoph Büchel's Response to Plantiff's Local Rule 56.1
Statement of Material Facts', Civil Action no.3:07-30089-MAP,
United States District Court: District of Massachusetts, filed on
13 September 2007. Editor's note.↑

As can be read in the documents presented by both parts for the
Civil Action.↑

See the comments by Joe Thompson, director of Mass MoCA, in
Randy Kennedy, 'The Show Will Go On, But The Art Will Be Shielded',
The New York Times, 22 May 2007; Geof Edgers, 'Behind doors, a
world unseen: Dispute cloaks massive installation at Mass MoCA',
The Boston Globe, 28 March 2007, in addition to the text of their
civil action, 'Complaint for Declaratory Relief', 21 March 2007,
and the subsequent 'Mass MoCA's Statement of Material Facts', all
under 'Civil Action no.3:07-30089-MAP', filed before the United
States District Court: District of Massachusetts.↑

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